À LA FIONA: Timbre Kitchen, Legana
For a milestone birthday some years ago, I had the most memorable dish I’ve ever eaten. It was at Josef Chromy’s restaurant. It was a bowl of miso broth, with a strip of ocean trout, a softly poached egg still egg-shaped, wilted greens and a scattering of sesame seeds. When you broke the egg, the yolk drifted out and continued cooking at some microscopic level. It was a playground in a bowl.
“Everyone raved about that dish!” said Matt Adams, its creator, when I asked him, years later, if it was one of his.
Back in the day, Adams helped Massimo Mele open Launceston’s acclaimed seafood restaurant Mudbar, before heading up the kitchen at Chromy’s. Then he took the lease on a place of his own, Timbre Kitchen, at Velo Vineyard in the West Tamar Valley.
It’s the perfect spot for a dining room specialising in local provenance ingredients, poised as it is between city and valley. Adams makes imaginative use of the space, gathering diners in the warm, timbered interior, on the deck, and around a fire-pit out front.
Every so often, the bromance with Mele is rekindled, and the two can be found suspending wheels of Elgaar cheddar over the flames and melting them onto sourdough. When Mele opened his Grain of the Silos restaurant with a hot-ticket launch, Adams was there serving grass-fed lamb in tiny morsels. Theirs is the street food you want with your craft beer at festivals: always the most delicious bite.
We are a party of nine this Saturday evening, as I’ve lured city friends to Timbre Kitchen. Adams has hustled through the past discombobulating year with takeaway pizzas and a set menu. Now he’s here to welcome diners personally and circle the tables explaining the dishes and pouring drinks. There’s no stiff formality; the mood is deeply convivial, with a buzz of conversation and laughter as you walk in, the dress code everything from fine knits and velvet to plaid shirts and tatts.
Velo wines complement the menu and we’re off to a colourful start with a lemony chardonnay and a jelly-bean orange pinot gris. The menu is a set selection of shared plates which can be complemented by deluxe additional dishes and sides. Initial concerns amongst our party about sharing and portions quickly evaporate, as dishes arrive and appetites are triggered by curiosity and some fine-looking food.
A couple of traditionalists in our party eschew the raw beef tartare with a tex-mex twist and black garlic dusted crispbread. That just leaves more tender tangy beefiness for the rest of us. We may not know what’s in the pasture sauce with the twists of sunchoke chips, but it’s green as grass, and delicious. Third dish, but by no means third place, in this entrée suite is a flatbread with fig and fine shavings of manchego cheese.
This small holy trinity is a typical Timbre table. It’s a crackerjack combination of flavour and texture, colour and shape and scent. It’s why we eat out. It’s the reason chefs are so deserving of their big hats, although Adams has given his away in favour of a fetching plaid shirt.
The first main to hit the table is the chicken, almond and salsa verde. It’s described on Timbre’s social media as “sex, lies and chicken thighs”. Whichever way you look at it, it’s an assemblage of things that were born to be together. I’ve eaten it a number of times, and it never tires. These are thighs which deserve the sighs they evoke.
By now, my companions are won over. People are pointing in awe at a luscious bringing-together of baby corn, tomatillo and capsicum. Sharing protocols are obliterated when the osso bucco arrives, and one diner makes a grab for the bone, and forks up the marrow in one greedy, gelatinous gulp.
Many of the dishes at Timbre are started or finished in the wood-fired oven, visible through the pass. This lends crunch, smokiness or depth, at the whim of the chef, and a small team of kitchen wizards working spells in the hot brick interior. Menus change all the time, with the season and with what’s coming through the door from local producers, some of them backyard growers. Adams has been known to buy his honey from a nearby bee-keeper, leaving cash in the honesty box. I’m betting the entrée figs came from that Esky at the end of a driveway in Rosevears.
The final dish of the day is a fat swirl of caramel mousse tinged, somewhat unbelievably, with miso and peanut butter, and topped with honeycomb. Even the hardened zero-sugar, zero-carb types are moved to take their chances. The plates only just stop short of being licked clean.
Timbre has emerged phoenix-like from covid hibernation with a new crew and renewed lust for life. The fires are stoked and the wines poured. Such is the goodwill Matt Adams and his restaurant have garnered.
Timbre Kitchen is located at Velo Wines, 755 W Tamar Hwy, Legana. Ph: (03) 6330 3677.
Fiona Stocker is a writer based in the Tamar Valley. She has published the books A Place in the Stockyard (2016) and Apple Island Wife (2018). For more information, see fionastocker.com.